Watch your face while strolling UC Irvine today. Balls will be flying as the Guinness World Record for largest dodgeball game is attempted on campus.

The current record, which is held by the University of Alberta, is 1,200 players. Irvine is hoping to have 2,000 ball throwers and dodgers out there today.

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The university was enlisted by the World Dodgeball Society--or WDS for short, as everyone surely knows--and Huntington Beach-based Next Level Athletic Sports, an adult recreation supplier and social network.

The game, which is rolled into the campus-wide Spirit Rally, will use balls, rules and game infrastructure provided by the WDS.

"We're always looking for new ways to raise awareness and spread our love of dodgeball," explained Michael "Handsome" Costanza, founder and self-appointed grand poobah of the WDS. "Attempting a world record-breaking game is a cause after our own hearts, and we applaud UCI for undertaking such a massive task. Whether or not they break the record, they're winners in our book."

Uh, exsqueeze me? "Whether or not they break the record . . ." What kind of defeatist bullshit is that, Handsome? Put your skirt back on, cut your hair, get a job, be somebody. You gotta believe to achieve!

His society, which is as much about pre- and post-game partying as it is the game itself, has a lofty goal: "We are unifying the world of dodgeball one nut shot at a time."

Damn, we should use it to bring UCI's warring Jews and Muslims together!

Matt Coker has been engaging, enraging and entertaining readers of newspapers, magazines and websites for decades. He spent the first 13 years of his career in journalism at daily newspapers before "graduating" to OC Weekly in 1995 as the paper's first calendar editor. He has contributed as a freelance editor and writer to several publications and been the subject of or featured in several reports online, in print and on the radio and television. One of countless times he returned to his Costa Mesa, CA, home with a bounty of awards from a journalism competition, his wife told him to take out the trash.